


mutually-assured destruction, and other empty threats

by arbitrarily



Category: GLOW (TV 2017)
Genre: F/F, Post-Season/Series 01, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-08 15:17:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12867336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: It's like this, Ruth thinks: Debbie's the goddamn American dream.





	mutually-assured destruction, and other empty threats

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hyenateeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyenateeth/gifts).



> Happy Holidays!

 

Ruth quit expecting people to like her a long time ago. 

Okay, that’s a lie. Sam could tell you that much. Debbie, too. Except maybe it’s not a lie. She doesn’t expect people to like her. She just wants them to love her.

Blah, blah, blah. It’s the same story of every girl who ever moved to L.A. with an impossibly empty and too-full heart and had her dreams crushed so thin and low she started wrestling for Saturday morning TV. That story. 

It’s Debbie’s story, too.

 

 

 

 

They’re not friends again. Not yet. Instead they crash into each other, literally, on a daily basis and throw each other around. Pulling hair, bruising their soft spots when a kick goes wild, straining their muscles against each other. It’s fucking pornographic. Sam loves it. 

“You gotta give them the spectacle!” he calls out to them, mid-practice. “Try it again!”

Ruth winces, untangles her splayed legs from Debbie’s. She can feel the crush of Debbie’s hip bone against her inner thigh. There are three reddened scratch marks lighting up Ruth’s upper arm where Debbie had scrambled for purchase before landing bodily against her.

Not friends _again_ is easier to process than not friends _anymore_ , at least for Ruth. Her hand is still wrapped around the firm curve of Debbie’s bicep as she pulls herself to stand.

Jesus. It’s all too obvious even for fucking metaphor.

 

 

 

 

Ruth likes strong arms.

Historically, they’ve been arms attached to men, buffed and toned, biceps not necessarily bulging but formed like a rolling hilly landscape. It’s the forearms too, the way they get that ropey, sinewy look, coiled strength obvious under a rolled shirtsleeve. They usually belonged to men with no interest in her. The men who, historically, have shown interest in Ruth always treated her like their attention was a great favor she should enthusiastically reciprocate. So, she did. But that’s a different story. Their arms were weak, and so, she guesses, was she. 

This is a story about Debbie. But all stories, in the end, are stories about Debbie if you ask Ruth. Debbie has strong arms. There's the cut of her clavicle, bending across to meet wide, rounded shoulders Debbie has always been overly self-conscious about. Ruth never got that. She has always envied those shoulders, or if not envied, then she has come to imagine her legs draped over them. She knows what her legs look like draped over them, if only in choreographed combat. She notices Debbie’s arms the same way she has always noticed everything Debbie has to offer. That hasn’t changed. A lot has changed, but not that.

Ruth likes tits, too. She’ll admit to that now.

 

 

 

 

“Hi. I’m Ruth?”

“Look into the camera. You can start, whenever.”

She cleared her throat.

Ruth met Debbie at the same audition, back when L.A. still had an ever-lessening novelty factor to her. When the city was new to her and she thought possibility was waiting behind each door she managed to pry open. It wasn’t; just the same balding producers and rough cuts of cocaine they didn’t share with the talent. 

Debbie had looked like every other girl waiting her turn to read the lines Ruth had just delivered to withering inattention and active disinterest. But, still, she stood out. She had that quality, Ruth could see it, that Ruth’s agent said Ruth categorically did not have, but, eh, we work with what we got, y’know? She thought it was called charisma. That, and a great rack.

Debbie had both.

“You believe this shit they got us scrapping over?”

Debbie had been the one to speak first, waving her casting sheet in Ruth’s direction.

 

 

 

 

Watching Debbie on a television screen was different than watching Debbie from across a crowded room. For one thing, you couldn’t catch her eye. For another, you had to share her. But Ruth had always had to share Debbie — that came with the territory of a woman like Debbie. She shone like a beacon, attracting if not admiration then simply attention. Ruth wasn’t unique in wanting to be near her. That became clear to Ruth watching Debbie at one o’clock in the afternoon after the local news. 

She was serviceable as an actress, or as serviceable as anyone could be delivering lines like, “I know it’s the amnesia, Charles, but you have to remember me!”

“So it’s not fucking Shakespeare,” Debbie had said at a party once, her breath stinking of coconut rum, her mouth too close to Ruth’s face as she leaned in towards her. She had her elbow bent and a lit Virginia Slims raised like a prop. Ruth hadn’t realized her disapproval was that clear. That, Ruth had been told back when she was still in school, was her biggest failing: her face showed everything. “Don’t take up cards, kid. They’ll clean you out.”

“It was Laurel, my evil twin, and I will have my revenge,” Debbie on the TV said.

“ _As, I confess, it is my nature’s plague to spy into abuses, and oft my jealousy shapes faults that are not_ ,” Ruth on an empty stage said to an almost empty audience.

 

 

 

 

The dressing room is crowded. Ruth sits before the mirror, smearing dark glitter on her eyelids. She never likes herself more than when she is sliding into character as Zoya. It's like tilting over a line, that swell of confidence that belongs to someone who is definitely not Ruth filling her. 

The girls are killing time before they film and Carmen is reading aloud from an issue of  _Cosmo_  opened in her lap. “How To Tell If You’re In Love With Him,” she announces. 

“Isn’t that, like, self-evident?” Melrose says, snapping a piece of chewing gum.

“Let her read,” Rhonda says. “I wanna know.”

“Who? Who are you in love with?”

“I don’t know. I need to know the signs.”

The signs include:

You smile just thinking about them. Everything reminds you of them. Their flaws charm you rather than annoy you.

You find excuses to say their name out loud, if only just to feel them in your mouth.

You collect facts about them like an amateur anthropologist, hoarding your findings to yourself and going over each in your mind late at night, polishing them all into something beautiful, unreal and unattainable. 

You play that same sound she made over and over again in your head, that breathless little pained gasp when you both failed to feint in practice and flesh met flesh.

You want her to hold you facedown into the mat and you want her to push and push and push and ignore you when you ask for mercy, ignore you when you ask for anything, but you’ll take what she’ll give you and if she’ll give you this, then you’ll take it, and if you take it, that has to mean love, that has to mean something, it has to mean everything.

 

 

 

 

Ruth knows how Debbie’s thighs fit in her hands. She knows how to squeeze and the muscle gives just enough for her blunt fingernails to bite into lycra and spandex. She doesn’t know but she wants to know if she leaves tiny little marks behind in her wake, if when Debbie undresses she looks down and she thinks, _Ruth_ , she touches her thighs and she thinks, _Ruth_ , she’s alone and she thinks, _Ruth_.

 

 

 

 

“I left Mark.” Debbie says it out of nowhere, the two of them the last to leave the locker room. “For real this time.”

“Oh,” Ruth says. She doesn’t think this is the sort of conversation you’re supposed to have in an old locker room that stinks of mildew and Rhonda’s drugstore perfume, with a sweaty leotard halfway rolled down your body, your former best friend turned actual enemy and television nemesis with her bare back to you. “I’m sorry?”

Debbie snorts. She snaps her bra into place with brutal precision, gives her breasts a lift and adjustment before glancing over her shoulder at Ruth. Sweaty, messy-haired, flush-faced topless Ruth with an old t-shirt held to her chest, wide-eyed and uncertain.

“You’re really not.”

 

 

 

 

Mark does not have strong arms. Mark fucks the way Ruth's found most men fuck: flat on his back and expecting her to do the work. 

If Debbie ever really wanted to know, Ruth would tell her: it wasn’t worth it. He gave her nothing she really wanted. She didn’t expect to be liked but she wanted to be loved, and she got neither thanks to him.

It’s unkind but also true to say she didn’t think of Debbie until after. Okay, that’s not true at all. She thought of Debbie, but not Debbie in her bed but rather as slotting a blade into Debbie, right through the ribs (just like Debbie’s character had done on TV two weeks before, a letter opener wielded as deadly weapon), and asking her, “Can you tell me how that feels?”

She really wants to know: what’s that feel like? Because all Ruth had known at the time and for a long time before was disappointment and loneliness and something flat and mean smothering her heart.

 

 

 

 

They’re alone in the gym, practicing. “The problem with the public is they’re never satisfied. You have to keep upping the ante.” That was what Sam had told Ruth earlier. 

“Okay, P.T. Barnum,” she had said, half-annoyed and half-already plotting what she, as Zoya, could do to Debbie, as Liberty Belle, in the ring. 

Debbie’s crotch is right over Ruth’s face. Sam told them he wants Debbie to say, “Eat this, Mother Russia!” so Debbie does, earnest the way she always is when a performance calls for sheer and total stupid melodrama. Ruth doesn’t laugh; her crotch is right there.

It’s so easy. Maybe that’s why she does it. For the first time in a long time, something between them — something other than this routine of pulled-punches violence — is easy. Debbie tastes like sweat and wet cotton, bitter. Ruth’s tongue is slow, hesitant but deliberate, against Debbie.

“What are you doing.” Ruth hears it, the tight way Debbie asks it, not a question, not the way she phrases it. Instead it’s equal parts warning and invitation, if such a thing is possible. Ruth doesn’t move, even though her neck is starting to cramp and all she wants is to taste more. Taste her under her leotard, eat her the same way Debbie has eaten at Ruth the entire time she’s known her. 

Ruth looks up at Debbie looming over her. The both of them are braced against each other, muscles tight. 

“I don’t know,” Ruth says, quiet. She doesn’t. She hasn’t known what she’s doing, maybe ever. Debbie’s face goes hard.

“Fuck you,” Debbie says. She almost sounds disappointed.

Ruth takes a deep breath. She feels like she’s vibrating with years worth of unspent energy. With expectation. “Yes,” she says. “Fuck me.”

It’s a stalemate, but a short-lived one. Debbie’s fingers curl in Ruth’s hair. She pulls and it hurts — the stinging burn of her scalp, the tightened muscles of her neck stretched, but she follows. Her hands cling to Debbie’s thighs; they spread open wider. 

Her cunt is there, still clothed, and this time, there’s nothing tentative about Ruth. She fits her mouth, open and wet, against her. Debbie’s hips buck immediately, chased by a surprised grunt. Ruth latches her mouth to her, dragging her tongue up and down, pushing against the fabric, wet now with Ruth’s saliva and Debbie. Ruth moans into it, feels Debbie’s thighs clench on either side of her face. It’s easy, it’s so easy. Ruth peels the soaked fabric aside and she sucks at her, messy and hungry, her chin wet as Debbie rocks against her. 

Debbie is mostly quiet when she comes, breathing hard like she does after a particularly rough routine. Her eyes meet Ruth’s as she reaches back, a brief searching hand slipping down between Ruth’s legs.

She scrambles off of Ruth then, snarling something that sounds like, “Come here,” and then Debbie’s kissing her, tasting herself as Ruth has tasted her. 

Kissing Debbie is brutal, teeth clicking and hands grabbing at each other, nothing soft in it. Debbie winds a hand down between their bodies. Ruth jolts when Debbie touches her again, her thumb frustrating against her, rubbing at her clit but not enough. It’s never fucking enough, not for Ruth — empty and too-full. 

“That made you wet, didn’t it.” Debbie says it as a fact, bites at the hinge of Ruth’s jaw with the same smug certainty. They’ve always been competitive with each other. Ruth should have known better that would include fucking, too. “I made you wet.”

Ruth whines, her hips shifting restlessly. 

“Poor, poor desperate Ruth,” Debbie says, mean and mocking. “Tell me.”

“Yes,” Ruth says, the word sticking in her mouth along with Debbie — her tongue, her spit, her cunt. 

Debbie yanks the crotch of Ruth’s leotard aside, the elastic biting into Ruth’s skin. She slips two fingers into her — easy, so easy — and Ruth clenches around them. She gasps when she starts to move, punishing and demanding. 

“You’d take anything I’d give you,” Debbie says. There's no judgment in that tone, only knowledge. Maybe awe.

“Yes,” Ruth says and her voice does not shake.

 

 

 

 

One week later, they’re in Ruth’s car. There’s a pulsing ache at the base of Ruth’s throat where Debbie caught her with a bent elbow during the telecast. She likes it, almost as much as she likes the mostly-healed mostly-faded bite mark along the curve of her breast, the fingerprint bruises scattered over her hips. That has to be on the list, How To Tell If She’s In Love With You: she makes you feel it.

Debbie sighs, weight of the world and everything. She stinks of stale sweat and powdery lotion, AquaNet. “I used to think about murdering you. Like, all the fucking time.”

Ruth smiles. “Yeah?” That counts, too. 

 

 

 


End file.
